Blog Post #2
My experience with Microsoft Word is extensive, especially within a school environment. Firstly, my high school had a mandatory class on the Microsoft 365 Suite of programs with Word and Excel being the most focused upon programs, so I've had plenty of experience learning about Word. Additionally, because it is the education standard, I have equal experience using it to write essays, take notes, and many other things. With this all being said, I still prefer using Google Docs whenever I'm given the chance. I find Microsoft OneDrive, while easy to understand, somewhat tedious to use. Similar to how Word is the educational standard for drafting educational assignments, Google is the standard search engine that I will always be signed in on. If I need to quickly draft up a document, therefore, it becomes the easiest to use tool as I won't always be signed into my Microsoft account on every computer. Additionally, I believe Docs, and by extension Drive, is simpler to share documents upon and quickly import documents into when compared to Word, which is a function that is very important to me. And lastly, since I use Chrome as my main web browser, the extensions available for Google Docs far outnumbers what I can find for Word and OneDrive, further making it my preferred.
As we advance deeper into the technological age and online age, I find that teaching people how to explore learning on the internet becomes more and more vital. This is why section 2.6 on the ISTE Standards for Educators stood out most to me. It talks about the adept usage of technology in crafting new and creative experiences for students within the classroom. I especially love sections 2.6.c that talks about introducing learning opportunities to students in the capacity of teaching them "design processes and computational thinking to innovate and solve problems." I think that technology is a fantastic tool when used to broaden a student's horizons on their natural problem solving skills, but simultaneously, a daunting ever-expanding beast that can sometimes be overwhelming. Curating a learning environment that naturally cages this beast into something manageable to a student, I believe, will be paramount to classroom educations as technology continues to advance.
Then there's the concept of "digital nativity" and how newer generations (myself included) are digital natives that grew up with technology ,and therefore, are more natively exposed to technological literacy, while "digital immigrants", who had to learn these technologies as they were introduced, are responsible for teaching these digital natives. In general, I think there's a lot of truth in the claim that these so-called digital natives are more comfortable in navigating online/technologically abundant spaces than digital immigrants. In a sense, technology is a language that needs to be learned how to be read, and once that language is learned, even when you encounter different dialects of that language, like new programs and websites, you'll still be well versed enough in the language of modern technology that you'll naturally be more capable of navigating these unfamiliar scenarios. I've seen this demonstrated in classrooms as well: there's a difference of aptitude and problem-solving capability between the two groups when it comes to using technology for sure. Speed of platform navigation or adapting to technological issues especially reveals these differences. However, I do not believe that these differences are pronounced in the actual education of students. My younger teachers and professors (the ones that'd be considered digital natives), from my experience, always leaned to more conventional methods of teaching and were actually less inclined to incorporate technology into the classroom. I feel like because they were more exposed to technology growing up, they were also more disillusioned to it as this grand new thing, and they instead focused more on conversational teaching, and it'd likely be the same for me.
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